For Bert O'Malley, MD, president and CEO of Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical Center, innovation is more than just a buzzword in healthcare.
"It's an important buzzword, in my opinion, because I think the discovery and innovation arms are not necessarily congruent every time, but they are linked significantly," he told Becker's. "That improves care problems and issues today and builds future care paradigms and treatment for tomorrow."
This perspective comes from his four years of experience at the helm of UMMC (a team at the organization performed the world's second transplant of a genetically modified pig heart last year). It is also from his experience as a head and neck cancer surgeon with a long history of innovation and discovery, mostly on drug development and surgical instrument development.
"It's been in my blood since training, and my interest in that early on was how do you make things better? How do you provide better current care for patients? How do you develop the future care? And that was personally exciting. I think innovation discovery gets people motivated, rallies people behind it because it's new, it's interesting, it's improvement. So there's a very important psychological aspect of positivity and enthusiasm that is valuable as well as the practical aspects of improvement and increased quality and decreased risk or harm," said Dr. O'Malley.
Given his passion for innovation and the burnout and angst seen in care teams during the COVID-19 pandemic, he saw an opportunity to rally UMMC workers behind a new initiative — an Innovation Challenge in partnership with the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The competition focuses on identifying and then investing in the ability to test initiatives to improve patient outcomes.
"We didn't have a forum for that," Dr. O'Malley said. There was an "emotional, psychological feeling coming out and going back into COVID-19 from 2020 to 2021, and it was a means of pulling people together with something different and new and in an area that they have expertise in, which is clinical care."
UMMC's Innovation Challenge piloted in 2021 with an investment, and applications went out for various levels of awards. Dr. O'Malley said the first round garnered more than 100 applications, and some of the applicants participated in a pitch session for their ideas, similar to "Shark Tank."
This past summer, UMMC held its third annual Innovation Challenge, and the competition thus far has offered several opportunities for awards up to $125,000.
One example, the founding recipient, is the Distress! gaming app from UMMC and Grendel Games. The simulation game is based on real patient scenarios and is designed to train clinicians to identify acute symptoms earlier. The content is developed by healthcare professionals, including respiratory therapists, nurses, pharmacists, physicians and others involved in rapid response to patients in distress.
Dr. O'Malley said about 100 members of coordinated care teams at UMMC have gone through the app, and there have been benefits, such as better responses and better closed loop of communication.
Those who have participated "become more assertive in a good way, advocating for the patient, not necessarily the current process," he said.
Dr. O'Malley said the Innovation Challenge has also reinvigorated the organizational culture, and workers who have used the app have seen improvement in how they play the game with different scenarios.
"The next stage is now how do we distribute it and popularize it and make it part of our standard work and standard presence," he said. "We think by doing that, it will foster the enthusiasm for engaging in innovation. Bringing people who may never have thought they could make a difference because they're not in the basic science laboratory or they're not inventing a new surgical instrument. But they're in the field and coming up with ways to significantly advance patient care."